We’re on the news! It’s only two minutes long, but features consumers from the Albany Center for the Disabled playing our game, Professor Kathleen Ruiz answering questions, description via newscaster, and an awesomely vague one-line quote from me. Damn right I laid out those constraints!

When I built the Atropos, I learned the valuable lesson that it’s difficult to create props (read: spaceship components) that look realistic. Since then, I’ve begun hording what I casually refer to as “spaceship parts”, which normal people refer to as electronics surplus or junk. In an effort of organization, I decided to create a mini-database to help me keep track of my collection.

My spaceship parts. Let me show you them.

I started doing metal casting about a month and a half ago after reading about it on the internet on and off for over a year. The premise is simple: melt zinc (~787F) or aluminum (~1221F) in a charcoal fed blast furnace and then pour into a mold made from a mixture of sand, bentonite clay (kitty litter!), and water.

My furnace consists of a normal clay pot inside a metal bucket with some basic concrete poured between the two. A hole is drilled through the side a little above the base; a 2’x1/2” steel pipe (not shown) feeds air from a hairdryer through this hole and to the charcoal, where it SUPERCOMBUSTS to a temperature hot enough to melt anything I’d care to melt.

I burnt an old broken laptop with it at a LAN party. It was pretty significant.

My crucible consists of a 4” long, 2” diameter steel pipe nipple (teehee) with a hardy steel end cap. I do all handling of it with a set of long, 90 degree pliers and a pair of welding gloves. Although somewhat dangerous, it’s surprisingly not that intimidating.

While I wish I could say that I’m exorbitantly talented with my ability to cast metal, it wouldn’t be close to true – most of my pieces require significant grinding to clean them up after they come out of the sand. I’ve still been able to make some neat things, so far.

The first piece I made – a copy of Hillary’s “bent” from her engineering honor society thingy. We made this during our second time firing up, melting down scrap zinc that I procured while in Albany. For simply pushing the original in our kitty-litter-mix and then pouring molten metal in its place, it turned out surprisingly well.

After a lot of things that didn’t turn out at all (mostly poor attempts at the lost foam method) I was able to make a really scrappy looking piece of bling. While the bent was a copy of an object, this was a more custom design, made by pressing a small wooden block into the sand to create the shape of a dollar sign. Turned out sort of ugly, but at least the shape was recognizable.

The first real thing that was remotely proud of is my hawk axe. The head was an abstract design that I came up with on the spot (sort of based off a sketch I had drawn in a meeting) and was shaped by the same wooden block technique I used to make the dollar sign. I then pressed the top pipe fitting, half filled with sand to preserve the lower threads, into the sand and cast the axe head directly into it. After letting it cool and removing it from the sand I was able to clean it up, polish it off, and screw it onto the handle.

The second axe below was cast in a similar method to the hawk axe, although didn’t firmly cast into the pipe union. I ended up grinding down the base of the head and hammering it firmly into the pipe, allowing for a more seamless junction. I then painted it with acrylic paints (silver zinc looks weird with black steel), covered it with a coating of polyurethane, and then wrapped a strip of black leather around the handle.

I made this a while ago, but never finished it – I wasn’t sure exactly where to go next, and, I guess, sort of lost interest. It’s got a bit of function, however, and thus I’m releasing it to the world!

Insight Studio was designed as a tool to assist in reverse engineering filetypes, such as what I did with Empire at War (albeit I simply used a hex editor for that one). After loading up a file into Insight Studio, there are three windows to use:

GraphWindow: The GraphWindow is used to get an overall view of a file, such as its entropy (how many relevant bits per byte – compressed data and images will typically rank higher than numerical data, although it can be somewhat irrelevant), percent text (what percentage is likely to be ASCII text), and significant zero score (something I invented; essentially scores the amount of zeros across the file, which results in a high score for aligned, numerical data). You can click on any of the graphs and hit the goto button to be sent to that location in the SegmentMapper.

SegmentMapper: The SegmentMapper is a glorified hex viewer, which allows you to define segments that can later be viewed. Type “help” in the prompt to see a list of the commands and examples of their use. Segments are chunks of the file, which simply consist of a start address and end address of the data in the file.

SegmentViewer: The SegmentViewer allows you to view the segments in various ways, such as pure ASCII text, as packed, random values, and as bitmaps (experimental). The bitmap view is restricted to one type of image encoding for right now (I never got around to implementing any others), as it’s technically just an experimental feature at the moment. The numerical value which is set to “16” by default for right now is the width of the stored image in pixels. Thus, for a 320×240 encoded image, you would enter 320, select a segment, and hit “Draw”.

By no means do I consider this a finished product, nor do I know if I’ll ever improve on it. Perhaps someone will find it useful or interesting. Enjoy!

Download Insight Studio